Threat Status for Wednesday, April 2, 2025. Share this daily newsletter with your friends, who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
A large and bipartisan coalition of senators wants to impose new sanctions on Russia if the Kremlin refuses to negotiate a peace deal to end the war in Ukraine.
… The push comes amid growing signs Russian President Vladimir Putin is rejecting President Trump’s ceasefire proposal following Mr. Trump’s March 30 statement that he’s “pissed off” about the Russian leader’s foot dragging.
… Speculation still swirls around what caused one of Mr. Putin’s limousines to explode near Russia’s Federal Security Service headquarters in Moscow.
… China has finished large-scale military drills around Taiwan, and the Pentagon is adding a carrier strike group to its campaign against Yemen’s Houthis.
… Denmark’s prime minister is headed to Greenland to try to build trust after National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and Vice President J.D. Vance visited a U.S. space base there as part of Mr. Trump’s push to take control of the Arctic territory.
… Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Dan Caine, Mr. Trump’s nominee to be the next Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, testified Tuesday that he has never donned a Make America Great Again hat for meetings with the president, contradicting comments that have been attributed to the commander in chief.
… And the National Institutes of Health has quietly removed a Chinese lab that performed grisly experiments on beagles from its list of facilities approved for animal experiments using U.S. taxpayer money.
Defense Department spokesman Sean Parnell said Tuesday night that the Carl Vinson Carrier Strike Group, now in the Indo-Pacific, will soon head to the Middle East, while the Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group, which is already in the region, will remain there as U.S. forces increase their bombing campaign against Houthi militants in Yemen.
The Carl Vinson Strike Group’s mission will be “to continue promoting regional stability, deter aggression, and protect the free flow of commerce in the region,” Mr. Parnell said in a statement, referencing the the U.S.-led effort to stop the Iran-backed militants’ targeting of commercial ships in and around the Red Sea.
U.S. forces have conducted several waves of strikes against the Houthis in recent weeks. Suspected U.S. airstrikes earlier this week hit Houthi positions around Sanaa, Yemen’s capital. Since November 2023, the Houthis have targeted more than 100 ships in the area, including U.S. military vessels, with missiles and drones. The Trump administration has warned Iran that it could face direct military action if it does not end its support for the Houthis.
Chinese military forces completed large-scale military drills around Taiwan on Wednesday, testing live-fire rocket attacks in the East China Sea just days after U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visited the region with warnings about Beijing’s growing military provocations.
During a visit to the Philippines on March 28, Mr. Hegseth announced that Washington will soon deploy a new autonomous missile system — the Navy-Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System — as well as drone sea vessels to the Philippines amid growing tensions with China. The new weapons and planned improvements to military and defense industry cooperation reflect “the strength of our ironclad alliance, particularly in the face of communist China’s aggression,” the defense secretary said.
Sources tell Threat Status the U.S. buildup in the Philippines aligns not only with the Trump administration’s efforts to deter Chinese military muscle flexing in waters near the U.S. treaty ally, but also around Taiwan. China’s exercises Wednesday, dubbed the “Strait Thunder-2025A” drills, were held in the middle and southern areas of the Taiwan Strait. China has vowed to take control of Taiwan, a U.S.-aligned island democracy that Beijing claims as its own territory.
China, Russia and North Korea are building up their nuclear arsenals at a frightening pace to intimidate the United States at a moment when Washington has little diplomatic leverage to strike new, traditional arms control deals to limit that nuclear expansion, according to Robert Joseph, a former U.S. special envoy for nuclear nonproliferation.
Mr. Joseph, who offered the assessment in remarks on “The Washington Brief,” a monthly online forum hosted by The Washington Times Foundation, warned that America must recognize the reality that “the Cold War concept of arms control is at an end.” Specifically, he argued that the Trump administration has hardly any of the leverage the U.S. enjoyed when it struck previous nuclear nonproliferation deals with Russia, such as the 1992 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty or the 1987 agreement on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces.
Adversaries today view nuclear weapons as a “zero-sum game” and consider them crucial to deterring the U.S. from intervening in a broader European or Pacific conflict, Mr. Joseph said. In principle, he said, adversaries are likely to oppose any deal they view as helping America in any way achieve its geopolitical or national security goals.
The Border Patrol detected just 7,181 illegal immigrants attempting to sneak into the U.S. across the southern border in March, the White House border czar said Tuesday, marking the lowest monthly total in records dating back decades. That averages out to about 230 people a day across the 1,950-mile border — fewer than one person per eight miles of border.
“I started as a Border Patrol Agent in 1984, which was 41 years ago. I cannot recall a single month since then that the numbers have been that low,” border czar Tom Homan said on social media. The numbers are particularly striking given the situation under the Biden administration, which regularly saw more illegal immigrants in a single day than the Trump administration saw in the entire month.
One revelation in the leaked Signal war council chat was that NATO’s European militaries lack the technological power to defeat Yemen’s Houthis and reopen the Red Sea to commercial shipping, writes Washington Times columnist Rowan Scarborough, who notes the Trump team’s assessment that European militaries “need the United States” because the “ragtag Houthi terrorist army has collected stockpiles of advanced anti-ship weaponry that Europe cannot counter.”
“This verdict guided President Trump and top national security officials to plan and unleash on March 15 a wave of missile and bomb strikes on Iran’s proxy,” Mr. Scarborough writes. “As a backdrop, President Biden freed up billions of dollars for terrorist-sponsoring Iran, enabling the repressive Islamic regime to respread weapons to Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis.”
With regard to the capabilities of European militaries, Mr. Scarborough underscores Mr. Trump’s complaint about NATO’s European members in an actual war. “They are not keeping up,” he writes. “They fall short on defense in favor of social welfare, knowing Uncle Sam will bail them out, essentially subsidizing their domestic spending.”
• April 10-11 — Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats, Vanderbilt University
Thanks for reading Threat Status. Don’t forget to share it with your friends, who can sign up here. And listen to our weekly podcast available here or wherever you get your podcasts.
